Geography of Heaven by Rory MacLean – soul-searching journeys into the afterlife
In this moving, sometimes grandiloquent grief-memoir-cum-travelogue, Rory MacLean pairs an affinity for new-age thinking with a habit of loftily holding forth (“none of us are created for naught”, “love can but lead to truth”) and a proclivity for arresting one-liners (“I watched gods walk on fire”). In his search for meaning in the five years after his wife’s untimely death from cancer, he shows himself to be both refreshingly broad-minded and unnecessarily crotchety, like a more cantankerous Michael Palin.
MacLean’s work as a travel writer has taken him across the world, whether flying a handbuilt plane over Crete or riding shotgun with a drug warlord in Burma. This is his first book since losing Katrin, for 32 years the “fixed point” in his life, whose final weeks and moments he describes tenderly. Unable to process her death, he turns to travel to seek out “thin places”: áiteanna tanaí in Celtic mythology, where the veil between worlds is porous. Starting in Jerusalem, his quest takes him to more than a dozen sacred locations, including an ashram in India, a Native American community in South Dakota, an “excruciating” Vipassanā retreat in Suffolk and, inevitably, an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru.
You can’t fault his commitment. He takes the alarming decision – mere weeks before the 7 October attacks – to infiltrate an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, hiding in the shadows from IDF patrols, in an attempt to recreate the circumstances under which Jacob (“a traveller like me”) dreamed of a ladder to heaven. In the US, he faces an oncoming tornado, “too transfixed by the unfolding storm” to seek shelter; in Bhutan, he spends two days travelling to a Buddhist festival along a road that is “little more than a narrow ledge hacked into the rock face”.
MacLean’s skills as a travel writer are evident. He brings to life a Herzogian boat journey down a river into the Amazon, “twisting like a serpent towards another world”. He describes a cremation ground in Bhutan in rich, resonant detail, from the “barley burned in a metal basin, its smell said to keep hungry ghosts at bay”, to the throaty chanting of the monks. In South Africa, he consults a sangoma or diviner; to this day, the country has four times more traditional diviners and herbalists than medical doctors. At the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, he witnesses a remarkable ritual involving trance-like dancing and offerings of flesh. The discussions of Victorian spiritualism and the use of AI to bypass grief are thoughtful and well judged.
But there are jarring tonal shifts, from the pompous (“Does sanctity fall from above or is it conditional on social convention, I wondered?”) to the colloquial (“kick the bucket”, “bunkum”). And more than once, the book is let down by outdated language about minority groups (described as “crippled” and “swarthy-skinned”). Do we really need to know whether every woman he encounters is “slender” or “chubby”?
Throughout, MacLean treads the line between credulous and open-minded. Science is invoked occasionally, only to be dismissed as “reductionist” and “pathetic”. Instead, he becomes fixated on numerology, calculating “the maths” of when Katrin will be reincarnated (according to different people he consults, 49 days after her death, or years later, potentially as a dog). He compiles a dossier of evidence that, in his mind, proves “without doubt” that Katrin’s soul lives on: a dream, a sunbeam, a blue ribbon, a friend’s furniture in Mexico being inexplicably rearranged.
In each new location, his soul-searching follows a pattern: initial disappointment, followed by a last-minute breakthrough. Much of the book hinges on him feeling a vague, indefinable presence – a tingling, a shift in the air – undoubtedly profound to him but almost impossible to put into words (“something infinitely subtle … it was there, and more than nothing”), which can be frustrating for the reader. A somewhat belaboured flight metaphor eventually leads him, many figurative and literal air miles later, to the realisation that what matters is the journey, not the destination.
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
